The clothes on our backs are intimately connected with bodily experiences, cultural, social and gender portrayals, as well as the economies of fashioning and re-fashioning across place and time. Garments reflect the priorities of local and international economies, collective and personal inclinations, religious norms and conversions. These materialities are shaped by global flows of cloth and beads, furs, ready-made and second-hand apparel, in dynamic processes of fashion exchange. Dress is a charged cultural instrument, as evident in colonial and decolonization processes, social and political agendas, animated by cross-cultural and commercial flows, industrial and institutional innovations.

This international conference will showcase new historical research on the centrality of dress in global, colonial and post-colonial engagements, emphasizing entangled histories, comparative and cross-cultural analyses. This scholarship redefines national and collective communities, in the practice of fashion and the dynamics of re-fashioning and re-use, from the seventeenth through the twentieth century.

Themes could include, but are not limited to:

Cross-cultural practices and patterns of dress and / or body adornment

Production and distribution of clothing (across cultures, entangled, comparative)

Gendered and ethnic shaping of dress and dress practice

Fashion politics of dress in globalizing contexts

Circulation and re-use of dress and dress idioms

Design in globalized contexts

Representations of clothing cultures

Appropriation / acculturation of designs, materials, motifs

Dress in colonial / post-colonial contexts

We especially welcome themed panels, maximum three speakers.

We welcome individual papers as well.

Submission Requirements:

For individual speakers: a 200-word proposal and a 1 page CV

For full panels: a 200-word panel rationale, plus 200 word proposals for each panel participant along with their individual 1 page CVs.

Send all submissions to: dgb.conference@ualberta.ca

Deadline for submissions: 1 October 2015.

Acceptances of papers to be announced: 1 December 2015.

Plenary Speakers:

Antonia Finnane, Professor, School of Historical & Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne. Author of Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation. She will address fashion in Qing/Early Republican China

Karen Tranberg Hansen, Professor Emerita. Department of Anthropology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences, Northwestern University. Author of Salaua: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia. She will address cultures of dress within Global Africa.

Ashley Sims, Doctoral Candidate, Department of History & Classics, University of Alberta

Meaghan Walker, Doctoral Candidate, Department of History & Classics, University of Alberta

Sophie White, Associate Professor, Department of American Studies, University of Notre Dame

Venue

The University of Alberta is one of the top five research universities in Canada, a public research institution located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. It serves approximately 40,000 undergraduate and graduate students and holds a variety of major collections, such as the Clothing & Textile Collection and The Mactaggart Art Collection. The former holds more than 23,000 textile and clothing artifacts spanning 350 years, from a variety of cultures. The latter holds more than 1000 pieces of textiles, clothing, hand scrolls and engravings from ancient and modern East Asia.

The City of Edmonton is rich in cultural venues and is the gateway city to the western north. It has a rich indigenous heritage, plus diverse multi-cultural populations, reflected in the food and cultures resident here. The River Valley winds through the city, with parks, trails and extensive public access, including from the University itself. The Art Gallery of Alberta is located in the city centre, linked by public transit. The AGA was designed by architect Randall Stout to reflect the distinctive environment of this northern city.

Edmonton is three hours from the mountains, either Banff National Park or Jasper National Park. To the east is the UNESCO World Heritage Site, Drumheller Dinosaur Provincial Park and the Royal Tyrrell Museum. These are just three of the distinctive natural sites to be found in this region.

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Museum Anthropology Editors

Lea McChesney

Curator of Ethnology, Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, University of New Mexico